Tag: wordpress

WordPress 3.0 is now live with nary a hiccup on jaredwsmith.com. It was mostly very smooth, though I did have a CSS change to make to my theme (looks like there was a small output tweak to the_category() that broke something — and I could have avoided it had I coded better). I’m also using W3 Total Cache, and while I can report that everything mostly works, I’m having some trouble uploading via FTP to my “CDN” — which, in reality, is just another account on another domain on my shared host. However, everything else is looking pretty good so far. Fingers crossed!

If you’ve been meaning to learn more about WordPress and you’re in Charleston, you’re in luck. Ian May, John Turner, and I will be giving a WordPress session at #chscowork tonight at 6 PM. Ian will give a walkthrough about how to get started with WordPress (both WordPress.com-hosted blogs and self-hosted WordPress.org installations); John will brief everybody on the beauty of WordPress MU and the upcoming multisite changes in WordPress 3.0, and I’m going to focus on a few really good plugins that I’ve come to rely on over the years. #chscowork is at the rehava Real Estate Store on International Blvd. See you there!

In addition to applying the WordPress 2.8.1 upgrade, I’ve also upgraded to the Carrington-based WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King, which provides a VERY slick interface for mobile devices to browse posts and pages. I do think the out-of-the-box styles could use some tweaking (particularly on iPhone, where the interface widgets are there but the fonts are Verdana rather than Helvetica Neue), but editing the Carrington theme is fairly straightforward. Regardless, it’s a great plugin to have (even though it’s probably overkill for a personal blog such as this) and I recommend it.

Going to try something new today — rather than destroying your streams and live-tweeting, I’ll rather post items to FriendFeed comments. That stream is embedded here for your convenience. :) If you have FriendFeed, feel free to add your thoughts on what I’m attending as well.

I’ll be right smack in the middle of the Research Triangle this weekend for WordCampRDU 2009, one of many WordCamp events dedicated to helping users of all skills levels, from beginner to expert, hone their skills and learn more about the ever-expanding world of WordPress.

I made a decision over three years ago to use WordPress for the reincarnation of this blog, and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier with a piece of software. The development ecosystem is thriving and Automattic, the parent company that governs the WordPress universe, have consistently made smart acquisitions (Gravatar, Intense Debate) that have further helped cultivate this healthy growth in WordPress as a platform. The ecosystem is so good, in fact, that it changed this developer’s behavior from one of “come hell or high water, I’m coding this myself” to that of embracing the community and taking advantage of the collective intelligence of a lot of folks who are even more enthusiastic about WordPress than I am. Here’s hoping that at WordCamp I can come away with the skills to start giving back, because my debts are great.

The keynote speaker is none other than Matt Mullenweg himself, founder of the project and Automattic. It’ll be quite a good time — if you’re there, I’d love to meet up!

Disgruntled College of Charleston fan, home after witnessing a loss to Elon of all teams, wants to sit down, sip on some Gatorade, and work on his Facebook “25 Random Things” meme post because seven of his friends have now tagged him and he just wants to END IT (and terrorize additional people with said meme).

So, he sits down and begins writing his post, when he wants to refer to a post on his blog for some of the answers. He finds a strange white space in his layout that makes zero sense whatsoever. He goes and checks the source code…and OMG. Keywords. Lots and lots of keywords. Viagra, tablets, medicine — you name it, it was there. Site: Compromised.

Had a bit of a wild ride putting WordPress 2.6.2 on jaredwsmith.com this morning, as I suddenly got confronted with the Evil Looping Login of Death, but obviously I got it fixed. (Here’s how.) To prevent this from happening, don’t be a gunslinger like me and pay close heed to the section of the upgrade instructions where they say disable all plugins before running the upgrade…

Just rolled WordPress 2.6 out to the site. Things are looking good so far. If you run a WordPress blog, the new features are pretty nice and do well to build on the major improvements in WordPress 2.5. As usual, let me know if you see anything wacky around here in comments. :)

I just threw WordPress 2.3.2 on the server. It fixes a few potentially nasty security bugs, so it’d be smart if you run your own WordPress installation to upgrade to this new one. It’s a quicker upgrade than most WordPress upgrades, particularly if you were using 2.3.1 — no database changes appear to be needed.